So, I’m looking for books to learn from over the summer since I’m still a student and I don’t have classes that really cover code or scripting where I am learning at. I want to mainly focus learning code and scripting for the major code languages that game companies use from Maya to Unity and in between. So, my question is what books would any one of you suggest for a newbie to start learning from and which coding language to start with?
Thank you in advance for the help.
Head First Python for a good foundation
Maya Python for Games and Film for a solid understanding of Maya python
MEL Scripting for Maya Animators for the ‘other’ Maya language , which is useful to understand in spite of pyhton.
C Programming Language, 2nd Edition
The infamous “K & R” text. It’s been a standard in programming for decades. It’s small, short, and to the point. The examples are written plainly and are easy to digest.
Will it be as immediately applicable as a book on Python or C#? Maybe not, but it’s a SHORT read and condenses all the fundamentals you would need into something you can read in an hour or two.
It’s based on the C language, obviously, but it covers all the basics in such a straight forward way that you will easily be able to adapt to other languages after reading it. It describes primitive types, arrays, and pointers in a way that is nowadays completely abstracted by other languages. You’ll also learn all the basics that transfer almost directly 1-for-1 to other languages like operators (+, -, *, /, ++, --, >, <, =>, <=, etc…) and basic terminology and structures (function, struct, etc…)
I’d highly recommend reading it in addition to the others. It’s one of my most cherished books (an original 1988 hardcover edition will sit proudly on my shelf for as long as I live), and when I was in my computer science program in college, EVERY professor had this book and swore by it being the only programming book you would ever truly need.
These sound great! I hope I get more suggestions, but I will start with these books.